Lamb with Couscous, originally uploaded by Aunt Christina.

This week's edition of Iron Chef featured a Casablanca theme, and so we made a Moroccan meal: lamb with couscous; a German meal:


schnitzel with noodles (because we didn't have this last week for Sound of Music, I was very happy to see it this week); and a French dish:


bleu cheese soufle. They were all delicious. My friend

hklbry

came along this time, and did a great job of coordinating the soufle making. (Basically she issued orders, and I obeyed :-) We also had some help from the feline chefs in the household.


Our host was of course, Rick from Rick's Place:


After we had tasted all of the food and voted for our favorite--I think the schnitzel won, but I don't remember for sure--we played a casablanca movie trivia game, where all of the questions were projected on the wall in an interactive powerpoint presentation.


That was a lot of fun, although I did miserably at it because I haven't seen the movie in years and hadn't had a chance to reacquaint myself before the party. But what was the most interesting was the technology we used--I've done powerpoint Jeopardy before, but I had never seen what we used to submit our answers.


They were these cool little remotes that looked like calculators. They sent a signal to Mike's laptop to register our vote; you could see up on the screen how many people had answered so far, and it counted down the seconds til "polling was closed." He uses this system at work, to give quizzes and reviews for his college students. It was so cool--I wish we'd had these when I was in school! And now, I really want one. (But he said it costs about $30 per unit, so maybe not just yet.) I would love to use this at the library for my teen Jeopardy programs. I am going to ask around to see if I could borrow a system like this from one of our local colleges. (Sometimes I borrow the academic challenge buzzers from the high school, for Battle of the Books, but that's designed for "Hey look at me! I just answered first!" competitions. This Turning Point system is for everyone to answer secretly at the same time, and then it tabulates the scores for you. Way cool and less stressful for shy kids.) Anyway, we had a lovely evening as always. The next one up will have a Titanic theme. As always, click on any photo to go to the Flickr set; there are more photos of the other meals being made, and what the trivia screens looked like.